


Always Too Late

by thatcrazywriterley



Series: The Too Late Tales [17]
Category: AEW, All Elite Wrestling, Being The Elite (Web Series), Being the Elite, young bucks - Fandom
Genre: Multi, Polyamorous Relationships, Polyamory, being the elite: 200, brother share a wife, emotionally draining, reader is MAAAAD, the aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:27:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23762293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatcrazywriterley/pseuds/thatcrazywriterley
Summary: In the aftermath of BTE 200, the Reader gives the brothers a piece of her mind.
Relationships: Matt Jackson/Reader, Matt Jackson/Reader/Nick Jackson, Nick Jackson/Reader
Series: The Too Late Tales [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695274
Kudos: 1





	Always Too Late

_(GIF owned by allelitewrestlings on Tumblr)_

“Absolutely not,” I said, looking across the counter at Nick and Matt. “It’s one thing to have you guys wrestling out in your ring on the tennis courts. It’s something _entirely_ different to watch you guys beat the hell out of each other all over the place. No. I’m not watching, and the kids aren’t either.”

“Mama! I want to watch!” Mattie whined from the table where she was working on her math work. “I can’t learn if I don’t watch.”

Pure terror turned me inside out. The baby settled inside me wriggled in response. I could feel the lump forming in the back of my throat. “No. And don’t you dare say another word about it, Mattea Jackson.”

The brothers looked at one another, communicating in that silent way of theirs. Nick leaned against the counter. “Y/N, Sunshine—”

“Don’t _sunshine_ me, Nick. One wrong move and one of you could be seriously hurt. Or worse. So don’t ask me to watch this. Don’t ask me to say I’m okay with this.”

“We’ve done this forever, Mama,” Matt tried, reaching across the counter to me. “We were backyard wrestling years before we got in a real ring. It’s going to be fine.”

“Trust us,” Nick said quietly, watching me with his bright blue eyes.

Tears burned behind my eyes. It wasn’t fair that he pulled that card. It wasn’t fair that they had made this decision without me. That they wanted Mattie and Nicole and Lee to watch this from the window. It was too much for me to handle.

“Don’t,” I replied, my voice breaking. “Don’t look at me like that and say _trust us_. You know that I trust you with my life, with our children’s lives, with each other’s lives. But God help me, I don’t know if I can trust you two not to take this too far.”

***

It didn’t matter what I said. They were bound and determined to do this regardless of what I said or how much I begged them not to. I was close to calling Matt Sr. and Joyce to come take the kids, but I knew that their dad would egg them on. And not even Joyce and I could stop them after that.

“You’re staying in here,” I said firmly to Mattie and Nicole, pointing them to the sofa in the living room. “And you’re not going to move until Dad and Papa have finished being idiots.”

“Mama, please—”

“ _No_ , Mattie!”

She crossed her arms and huffed, angry at me. I didn’t care. I couldn’t hide how terrified this whole ordeal left me. I didn’t want to think about the aftermath and the sound of the video clips from the computer in Nick’s office once it was all over. The thought of being in the house just then was enough to make me feel sick.

There was a loud thump out by the detached garage on the other side of Nick’s house. They may have started down on the tennis courts, but it seemed like they’d made it up to the house. I cursed them under my breath, my ears straining for every noise.

***

It went on forever. I swore they were out there for hours, but it couldn’t have been longer than forty-five minutes or so. Mattie pouted the whole time, but I couldn’t worry about that. My eyes stayed trained on the door, waiting for them to appear.

Time crawled on, and my stomach churned. I was sure that something had gone horribly wrong. That someone had broken something or worse.

The side door opened, and Mattie jumped to her feet, ready to run toward her Dad and Papa. One look from me shut that down quickly. She went back to pouting, glaring at me as if she hated me.

I made sure that RJ was in his swing and that Lee was in his playpen before disappearing into the kitchen. My heart fell into my toes when I saw them. I’d heard the splash into the pool, but it looked like they’d taken showers at Nick’s before coming back. They’d left their gear behind and come back in t-shirts and sweatpants, damp hair knotted back.

But it wasn’t their clothes that worried me. It was the way Matt shuffled in, his hand wrapped around behind him, the back of his hand pressed to the base of his spine. It was the giant red weal that ran down the side of Nick’s arm. It was the scratches along Nick’s forehead and across his nose and cheekbone that were still oozing blood. It was the bruise that was already blooming on Matt’s forearm. It was the pain that was evident in their eyes.

I sank against the counter, trying desperately not to make a sound.

It wasn’t the time, but I couldn’t help myself. “Are you happy now, Nick?” I snarled, looking at my blue-eyed husband. I wanted to cry at the pain etched on his face and the blood turning to scabs on his brow. “You got your match. Do you feel better?”

“Y/N,” he began, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “This isn’t any different than any other bump we’ve taken.”

“Yes, it is! Because those others were part of your job, they were accidents.” I gestured between the two of them, my heart beating overdrive in my chest. “You did this to each other _on purpose_.”

Matt started to speak, but snapped his mouth shut when I glared at him.

“Your children are going to freak out when they see you like this. RJ is too young to remember this and maybe Lee might not understand, but Mattie and Nicole know that you did this.” I felt my head spinning. I gripped the counter for support as the world tilted sideways. “Did you think about that while you were out there throwing each other off roofs and kicking one another in the face _with a shoe of thumbtacks_? Did you?”

They both looked at the floor sheepishly. Matt shuffled across the space between us, and I swear I felt my heart break in my chest. He reached for me, one hand curling against my cheek, the other settling on the swell of my belly. His forehead bumped mine gently.

“I’m sorry, Y/N,” he murmured softly. He kissed me, a faint sort of kiss that was a barely there brush of his lips against mine. “I’m sorry. We’re dumbasses and we don’t think and I never should have let it get this far and I’m sorry.”

My lungs burned as I choked to get air. One of my hands wrapped around Matt’s wrist as the other reached past him for Nick. He circled around next to us, slipping his arm around me and resting his lips against my hair. “I know you’re mad—”

I looked up into his blue eyes and felt the air get sucked out of the room. My gaze shifted toward Matt, latching onto the deep tones of his brown eyes, and knew the floor had fallen away beneath me. “I’m not mad, Nick. I’m scared. I’m terrified.”

They wrapped their arms tight around me, sandwiching me between them. After a moment, their arms moved, embracing each other as well. Nick gasped against my hair, sniffling as he tried not to cry. Matt didn’t bother. I felt his tears hot and burning against my cheek.

“One mistake… one bad bump…” I whimpered against Matt’s chest, fingers fisted in his shirt. “I can’t do this without you. Without _both_ of you. If something happened, if I lost one of you… it would break me. If I lost both of you… it’d kill me.”

“Don’t say that, Y/N,” Nick retorted vehemently against my hair. “You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met. You don’t break that easy. And you wouldn’t give up on our kids.”

Matt breathed deep to get a hold on himself. “I promised you, Y/N— _we_ promised you—that nothing would ever stop us from coming home to you. _Nothing_. And, God knows, we don’t deserve you.”

“Not even a little bit,” Nick added, lips curling a little against my hair.

***

“Does it hurt, Dad?” Mattie asked after dinner. Nick was sitting in the floor with Lee and RJ, although he’d likely bruised his tailbone, so he was sitting on a pillow. His eldest daughter was on the sofa next to him, concern in eyes so like his.

“Which part, my love?” Nick replied, grinning up at her as he held RJ by the waist so he could bounce. She looked him over before pointing to the scratches on his face. He chuckled. “Nah, not much. Stings a little.”

He watched his daughter shift her attention down the hallway to the bedroom where Y/N packed Matt into an ice bath. “Is Papa okay?” She twisted her fingers in her lap, chewing nervously on her bottom lip.

Sighing, he bumped her in the knee with his arm all while trying not to grimace when there was pressure on the swollen weal on bicep. “He’ll be okay. Mama always takes good care of him. Of both of us.”

“Mama was mad,” she replied. “Really mad.”

“She was scared.”

For a moment, they sat quietly. Then she plopped down in the floor next to him. Before he could say anything, he glanced up to see his wife coming down the hallway. Her face was ashen and tearstained, her eyes glittering, her hands curved protectively over her belly. She had always been scared for them before big matches. But now, the terror was bigger and deeper than it had been before. Now… there were four kids and one on the way and she carried that worry with her every time he and his brother left for a show.

She was a wrestling wife twice over. They’d met because of this business. But it was foolish of them not to realize that she worried twice as much as any normal wrestling wife. Seven times as much.

Nick’s heart skipped a beat as she came by, leaning over to drop a kiss to his once bloodied brow. God, he loved her desperately and completely, even when she called him on his idiocy and his bullshit.

***

Matt closed his eyes and sank into the feel-good pain of the frigid water in the tub. Y/N had paced back and forth between the bathroom and the kitchen time and again with buckets of ice to help ease the pain in his back. Every part of him hurt. But nothing so much as his heart at the knowledge of how much they’d scared the woman they loved.

They’d been so wrapped up in this generated rivalry for the show that they’d never stopped to think what Y/N might think of it. She’d known them a long time, but she had missed their backyard days. Yet she’d seen them in the ring together… she knew what they were capable of together… and she’d carried this fear of what they’d do _to_ each other when there weren’t any rules to stop them.

She slipped back into the bathroom, another wide bowl filled to the brim with freshly-made ice from the freezer. She knelt next to the tub and gently shook the ice out into the water, swishing it around with her hand.

Matt reached for her, not caring that it made his muscles burn and ache. He tucked her hair behind her ear and stroked her cheek with his thumb. She was everything to him—to _them_. She was the woman who backed them up, who held them up, who carried their family while they chased their dreams. She was the mother of their children.

God help him, Matt would die for her. He would do anything for her. There wasn’t enough space in his heart for the love he had for her. The universe wasn’t big enough.


End file.
